The explosion entirely vaporized the landing craft, no measurable parts of which have ever been found. But it did far more than that. It sank ten ships, including two battleships, an aircraft carrier, and three submarines. Most potently, photographs taken a millisecond or two after the blast reached the surface show a dark stain rising vertically up along the side of the great water column. This stain is believed by analysts to be the entire battleship Arkansas, upended by the enormous blast and seemingly pasted onto the column’s side before being hurled into the maelstrom that followed and then thrust back into the water upside down. This was a mighty battleship, with a displacement of twenty-six thousand tons. To be reduced to a mere stain, a mid-ocean skid mark—with the whole starboard side of her hull, the side that had faced the bomb blast, crushed as if by some monumental hammer blow; and then her ruined self thrown backward into the Pacific mud, with her guns lolling out of their upended casemates like the tongues of the hanged Mussolinis—is a fate few would wish on any ship. Especially not a ship with so proud a heritage as the Arkansas, built in 1910, with service in both world wars, and with Normandy, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa among her battle honors. Her sudden annihilation as an almost casually picked-up and tossed-away victim of the supersonic subsea pressure wave from the bomb must have made many an admiral shake his grizzled head.
The plutonium bomb Helen of Bikini, used in the underwater Baker shot of Operation Crossroads, expelled disastrous quantities of fallout, ending the series. The dark stain at the column’s lower right is said to be the entire battleship USS Arkansas. U.S. Department of Defense.
There were months of subsequent scientific fascination with this one bomb—a whole conference was convened eight weeks later to deal with the vast amount of data that came from the explosion. Elaborate new atom bomb terms were created: the Wilson Cloud, the slick, the crack, the bubble, the base surge, the cauliflower.
Geophysicists, unexpectedly, learned something from the explosion that helped solve a near-Pacific problem of old: why the 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatoa had caused a tsunami. It turned out that, unwittingly, the two detonations, the volcano and the atom bomb, somewhat mimicked each other. The A-bomb’s explosion created a huge underwater bubble of fast-expanding gas; and the water displaced by the bubble formed a wave ninety feet high, which then rocketed toward Bikini Island, and was still fifteen feet high when it got there seconds later and picked up ships and tossed them onto the beach with cool impunity and then flooded the entire island.
Krakatoa’s explosion did much the same thing: the island of the volcano was vaporized; seawater rushed into the white-hot void and then similarly flashed into bubbles of superheated steam, which triggered a surface wave. Big volcanoes are very much larger than anything even nuclear-armed mankind can manufacture. The Krakatoa tsunami killed forty thousand and then spread around the world, being seen and felt ten thousand miles away hours later. Bikini did no such thing.
But this second Bikini bomb also caused one terrible and entirely foreseeable wrong of which Krakatoa was manifestly not guilty. It spread abroad a vast and deadly amount of radiation. The military had been given due warning that this would happen. Admiral Blandy, who had once famously declared, “I am not an atomic playboy . . . exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim,” was told that this bomb would be much more dangerous than its predecessor. Its plume of radioactive by-products would not be swept away by upper-atmosphere winds, but would be dumped directly into the lagoon, and would contaminate the waters and the shore and any ships that might survive the initial explosion. The scientists said that to go ahead would be foolhardy. But Blandy, who would later celebrate Operation Crossroads with a party whose centerpiece was a cake decorated with a large mushroom cloud, decided to go ahead with the test anyway—and the result was a catastrophe.
The cloud of falling debris itself produced a considerable amount of radiation, as expected; but as this column was falling back to the sea, a nine-hundred-foot-high wall of mist—the base surge, as it was later called—spread outward from the column and quickly enveloped the surviving ships as it rolled over them. This turned out to be the killer wave, and no one had known it would occur or how dangerous it would be. But it contained the majority of the fission products of the explosion, and though their total mass (three pounds or so, combined with about ten pounds of plutonium left over from the blast) might seem trivial, the substances were so toxic that an immense cleanup operation had to be undertaken, and very, very fast.
Yet the navy had made no advance contingency plans to do this. The result was an instant panic among the officers, and then sheeplike obedience by thousands of sailors who, wearing in most cases shorts and T-shirts, and using hoses, sprays, mops, and buckets of lye, were landed on each of the intensely radioactive vessels and ordered to clean away the residual material as quickly as they could. Fifty ships promptly set sail into the lagoon with fifteen thousand enlisted men, all soon bent on measuring and cleaning and hosing and decontaminating—and at the same time unwittingly absorbing, in their clothing, on their skin, in their hair, in their lungs, and on everything they subsequently touched, unimaginably excessive amounts of radiation. Plutonium debris was in any case not detectable by Geiger counters, so contamination with this most insidiously dangerous element went unnoticed at first.
Navy commanders on the spot had been given an impossible task, one that was incredibly perilous and that displayed the cruelest peacetime folly of having well-protected officers ordering wholly unprotected servicemen to perform the most treacherous labor. Pictures show groups of men swabbing the decks as they might have done after a topside dinner party, cheerful and vastly amused. One man said the ships were covered with sand and chunks of coral from the seabed, and he proudly displayed a chunk of rock he planned to take home, then put it in his pocket.
Though statistics relating to the later fates of these men—specifically, figures showing which of their number died of cancers that could reliably be put down to the Bikini bomb—are muddied, scientists quickly recognized, as the navy brass clearly did not, the terrible potential dangers. As a result, the next scheduled test, Crossroads Charlie, was canceled, and the Crossroads series formally terminated. Admiral Blandy was moved away from the Pacific to command the Atlantic Fleet, where he retired after three more years. He died in 1954.
But this was by no means the end of Bikini’s nightmare. For one thing, the displaced islanders—by now largely overlooked in the drama of the weapons testing program—were in ever-worsening shape. When Chief Juda returned to Rongerik from the Baker test, and reported with his characteristic innocence that their islands still looked much the same and all the palm trees were still standing, he was addressing a community on the verge of starvation. The supply caches left behind by the Americans had run out; most islanders now survived on thin gruel and barely edible fish; a fire had devastated their main coconut plantation. A visiting Marshall Islander reported that the Bikinian exiles were emaciated, “just skin and bones,” and an American doctor found compelling evidence of real malnutrition.
The islanders found an unanticipated champion. Harold L. Ickes, who had been Roosevelt’s interior secretary for more than a dozen years, the man who desegregated the national parks and who dedicated Boulder Dam and who was in many ways the personification of the practical implementation of FDR’s New Deal, got involved. By now retired, he was still a formidable champion of the underdog. In late 1947 he wrote a syndicated column decrying the treatment of the Bikini Islanders: “The natives,” he declared, “are actually and literally starving to death.”
All Washington read Ickes’s essay, and it shocked Truman’s administration into action. The government tried at first to deny responsibility—asserting, untruthfully, that the Bikinians were at fault: “[T]he natives selected Rongerik themselves,” said a statement. “We built them houses, schools and watersheds on that island, and they were perfectly happy initially. Later it developed that the island was not as productive as originally expected, and we had to augment their food supply by bringing in food for them.”
Few bought the lie. So boats and seaplanes were suddenly scrambled, and far away from the White House and the National Press Club, out on a sleepy mid-ocean atoll, an operation commenced that